The EU AI Act: Obligations by Role and Risk Tier

The AI Act is in general application, and the timetable most compliance plans are working from was amended in 2026. Role before tier: what a business has to do depends first on whether it is a provider or a deployer, and only then on which tier the system falls in.

The timetable most people are working from is out of date

The AI Act applies from 2 August 2026. That date has passed. But the schedule publicised in 2024 is no longer the schedule: Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 amended the Act in July 2026, and among the things it changed were the dates on which the high-risk obligations begin to bite. Anyone planning against the original Article 113 is planning against a superseded text.

The prohibitions have been live since February 2025; the high-risk build-out now has longer than it did. Getting those two facts the wrong way round is the commonest planning error here.

Four things sit outside that table and change what a business must do when:

• Marking of existing systems. Article 50(2) marking applies by 2 December 2026 to systems placed on the market before 2 August 2026.

• A grace period. Under Article 111(2), a high-risk system of a type lawfully on the market before the relevant date is not caught unless significantly changed; for systems intended for public authorities the date is 2 August 2030.

• AI in machinery is now governed through Regulation (EU) 2023/1230, with delegated acts to apply by 2 August 2028 — a change sitting outside the AI Act itself.

• National sandboxes must be in place by 2 August 2027.

One correction worth making explicitly: Chapter XII applied from 2 August 2025 with the exception of Article 101. Commission fines on providers of general-purpose AI models apply from 2 August 2026.

Role before tier

The Act allocates obligations by role first. A provider develops a system, or has one developed, and places it on the market under its own name. A deployer uses a system under its own authority in a professional capacity.

Most businesses find they are deployers of what they bought and providers of what they built and badged. The roles attach simultaneously, to different systems, with different duties — and a deployer who puts its own name on a bought-in system can become its provider.

This is where the supplier contract does real work. What the supplier warrants about classification, documentation and conformity decides how much of the burden actually lands on you, whatever the Regulation says about roles.

Prohibited practices, and the two added in 2026

Article 5 bans a defined set of practices outright — not a tier to be managed, but a prohibition on placing on the market, putting into service or using. The original list covers manipulative techniques that materially distort behaviour and cause significant harm, exploitation of vulnerabilities, and social scoring.

The 2026 amendment added two more, applying from 2 December 2026: systems that generate or manipulate realistic material depicting an identifiable person's intimate parts or sexually explicit conduct without that person's explicit consent; and systems generating child sexual abuse material. Any business operating image or video generation should be checking its guardrails against those two before December.

High-risk, and the carve-out that narrowed it

There are two routes in, now commencing on different dates.

Safety components of regulated products. A system is high-risk where it is a safety component of, or is itself, a product covered by the listed Union harmonisation legislation and that product needs third-party conformity assessment. The 2026 amendment narrowed this materially: systems used solely for non-safety aspects — user assistance, performance optimisation, efficiency, convenience, quality control — do not qualify; but systems whose failure would endanger health and safety do, regardless. And a product requiring assessment solely for non-health-and-safety reasons, such as radio spectrum interference, does not meet the condition.

The Annex III list is the route most software businesses meet. Article 6(3) is the escape valve and is narrower than it looks: a system is outside only where it poses no significant risk of harm — including by not materially influencing the outcome of decision-making — and only where it performs a narrow procedural task, improves a previously completed human activity, detects decision patterns without replacing human assessment, or performs a preparatory task. If you rely on it, document why.

General-purpose AI models: a role the tiers do not cover

A business that develops a general-purpose model and places it on the EU market under its own name is the provider of that model — a distinct role under Chapter V, in application since August 2025. A business that only integrates someone else's model is the provider of a system, not of the model, and relies on the model provider's downstream documentation.

Modifying a third-party model does not by itself make you its provider: under the Commission's guidelines that happens only where the modification is significant, the indicative criterion being training compute exceeding roughly a third of the original. If you fine-tune at scale, answer this deliberately rather than by default.

The obligations are documentary — technical documentation for the AI Office, information for downstream providers, a copyright policy respecting text-and-data-mining opt-outs, and a public summary of training content. Models under a free and open licence are exempt from the first two unless they carry systemic risk. Systemic risk is a tier of its own, presumed above 10²⁵ FLOP of training compute, bringing notification, adversarial testing, risk mitigation, incident reporting and cybersecurity duties. Models on the market before August 2025 have until 2 August 2027 to comply.

Where Latvia has got to

For most of the economy the Act does its own work: it is a Regulation, and it applies directly. Latvia has legislated in two places that matter.

The financial sector is done. The Financial Market Digital Operational Resilience and Artificial Intelligence Use Law applies the Regulation's AI requirements to a long list of financial market participants — credit institutions, payment and electronic money institutions, investment firms, insurers, fund managers and others.

There is a national AI Centre, with a sandbox. The Artificial Intelligence Centre Law establishes a Centre whose functions include operating a special regulatory environment for developing AI systems, with its own data-processing conditions.

For a business outside the financial sector, which Latvian authority will supervise it under the Act is a question this article does not answer, and one to check rather than assume.

Where to start

The sequence that works is role, then tier, then date. Establish whether you are provider or deployer of each system, noting that the answer can differ system by system. Test against Article 5 first, because that tier is live and two new prohibitions arrive in December. Then classify against Annex III — and if you think the carve-out takes you out, write down why.